Diego Lapiduz epitomized the headline message about GaaP being an enabler of innovation, showcasing his work at the 2015 Cloud Foundry summit.

He comes from the IT tech innovation sector and wanted to make a difference by applying these types of skills to public sector needs, one of the first results being the launch of Cloud.gov, described as “the Government Innovation Platform”.

The UK was especially lucky in having ministerial level understanding, vision and support for the concept, meaning it was accurately targeted at key goals, most notably a modular, reuse-centric approach that would yield faster delivery of digital services and large-scale cost reductions.

As Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, describes in this article one of the biggest cost driving challenges government faces is this duplication across departments, such as the MOJ writing off a £56m project when it discovered the same system was already being developed by the same supplier with the Cabinet Office.

GaaP expands this principle to all of government IT, where new systems will be built upon a similar layer of building block components, rather than being reinvented from scratch each time.

Transformational Digital Government

All government agencies want to better adopt digital services and power dynamic new service models for citizens, but the reality is that these are significant technology challenges which many lack the in-house skills for.

GaaP standardizes repeatable ‘recipes’ for common scenarios, making them immediately deployable via Cloud computing services, with the most critical feature of the design being a modular ‘lego brick’ approach to assembling applications, rather than writing all the software yourself.

For example the ‘Notify‘ service is part of a growing portfolio of Identity building blocks, so that citizens don’t have to remember a different username and password for every government app they need to use, they instead can log in once, and have this reused across them all.

Vastly reduced public sector IT costs

This last point about common service reuse is not just better in terms of technology efficiency, but can be the lynchpin to realizing £ hundreds of millions in public sector savings overall.

In short the primary cause of bloated government spending comes from the ‘traditional’ approach to procurement – The ‘funeral march’ RFP (Request for Proposal) process that can see agencies spend 18 months in writing these documents alone, before years of follow on IT implementation contracts which suffer from very high failure rates and poorly managed cost controls.

GaaP tackles these issues by codifying the principles of ‘don’t reinvent the wheel’ directly into the software models themselves, so that these expensive duplications aren’t needed later down the line.

The UK G-Cloud Digital Marketplace is mainly still just a “yellow pages” of Cloud suppliers, and so we can see that any one of these other trends might compliment and extend it further to add more powerful capabilities and boost uptake even more, and the successful formula for doing so an ideal recipe for all other governments to follow for the same reasons.

As the name suggests a GaaP strategy would literally furnish Scotland with a platform for new growth in such away it greatly contributes to defining a highly lucrative Independence scenario.

A key example of this platform enabling effect can be seen through the role it can play in helping achieve multiple other goals. For example a platform would facilitate better SME markets and also Personalized Data Services.

]]>http://digitalgovernment.io/gaap-platform-transformational-digital-government/feed/0DevOps for Agile Digital Governmenthttp://digitalgovernment.io/devops-agile-digital-government/
http://digitalgovernment.io/devops-agile-digital-government/#respondWed, 14 Feb 2018 15:07:06 +0000http://digitalgovernment.io/?p=149Cloud.gov – Government Innovation Platform Diego Lapiduz epitomized the headline message about GaaP being an enabler of innovation, showcasing his work at the 2015 Cloud Foundry summit. He comes from the IT tech innovation sector and wanted to make a difference by applying these types of skills to public sector needs, one of the first […]

Diego Lapiduz epitomized the headline message about GaaP being an enabler of innovation, showcasing his work at the 2015 Cloud Foundry summit.

He comes from the IT tech innovation sector and wanted to make a difference by applying these types of skills to public sector needs, one of the first results being the launch of Cloud.gov, described as “the Government Innovation Platform”.

iPaaS and Microservices

This is a complimentary and accelerating architecture for an overall Cloud Native approach. For example in this Slideshare presentation Microsoft describe how the PaaS layer will evolve to become an iPaaS, ideally suited to integrating business systems via microservices.

DevOps: Transforming Procurement for the Composable Enterprise

Although GaaP is naturally a technology heavy conversation it’s actually non-technical aspects that offer the most illumination on the topic, especially for senior executives, most notably the overall organizational transformation in particular Procurement.

You might not have thought Procurement would be relevant to the software engineering scenario, but consider the broader context of IT they exist within and how much of the resource they use is bought in by the organization. When you consider the RFP (Request for Proposal) bidding process is the most common technique used for sourcing business applications for government, and that these can take months and years to conclude you can see how the two begin to relate, how one can act as a throughput bottleneck on the other.

Agile DevOps

In a Linkedin blog David Callner begins to explore how DevOps might be adopted in the public sector, noting how RFPs increasingly now feature a call for the use of Agile rather than Waterfall methods.

In particular he describes how RFPs act to collate large volumes of user requirements, a process which can take months, followed by months of supplier engagement to bid the RFP and then further months for contracts and implementation, stretching out over years beginning to end and unsurprisingly resulting in large failure rates.

In short it’s a process of trying to consume a large elephant and so instead the better approach is to break up the challenge into ‘bite size chunks’. David also describes how in some scenarios they instead work more collaboratively with agencies, to capture requirements into Agile Product Backlogs and organize these into Epic work streams, that can be worked on continuously from beginning through end.

The PaaS approach compliments and accelerates this approach by baking the procurement into the technology, empowering developers to self-serve their own requirements, and critically, employ the use of pre-developed templates and module integrations. The future of enterprise business systems is no longer buying one monolith app from a single vendor, but instead composing together modular solutions that span across internal legacy apps as well as across the XaaS spectrum.

DevOps: Teams and Roles

The reason Pivotal is such a good example of this scenario is not just that they offer a managed implementation of the PaaS, but also bring considerable expertise in the surrounding Cloud Native practices, such as DevOps, Microservices and containers et al.

A great example is this Medium article which explores the dynamics of new team models for DevOps, defining a number of specific roles and how they interoperate, such as:

Developer/Engineer

Operations

Product Owner/Product Manager

Designer

Tester

Architect

Data scientist

GaaP on Pivotal Cloud Foundry – Cloud Native DevOps for Government

Defining a repeatable GaaP architecture with these same kinds of capabilities, is considerably easier when you explore a possible real-world implementation, making many of the somewhat esoteric design principles much more tangible.

Governments can adopt wholesale this Cloud Native approach off the shelf, as it is a common, generic model for increasing the agility and throughput of any software team.

It can then be further tailored for the public sector scenario through defining a second ‘Value Line’ as shown in the diagram, from the top upwards above the apps, to represent a further layer of government-specific modules and tailorings. For example integration of federated identity services such as the IDaaS like Gov.UK Verify.

This will offer government agencies an entirely new paradigm for addressing the most fundamental of their enterprise IT challenges: Joined up, integrated working and sharing of data across multiple agencies and systems. Rather than hard-coding yet another citizen authentication process into another application, this approach instead calls upon shared, component services such as Identity Authentication.

]]>http://digitalgovernment.io/devops-agile-digital-government/feed/0Blockchain as a Service – A Framework for Digital Government Identityhttp://digitalgovernment.io/blockchain-as-a-service/
http://digitalgovernment.io/blockchain-as-a-service/#respondWed, 14 Feb 2018 15:06:04 +0000http://digitalgovernment.io/?p=147Blockchain as a Service for enabling new Digital Government services.

A super-hot innovation space is the intersection between these protocols and the Blockchain, which caters for additional functionality pertaining to the integrity of associated transactions, like ‘smart contracts’.

A blockchain identity (or blockchain ID) is a generic term used to refer to any identity on the blockchain. Users can have one blockchain identity or many and can register them just like one would register domain names or accounts on Facebook or Twitter.

Leveraging the blockchain for identifier functions is a very powerful dynamic, and is already being pioneered by ventures like Shocard.

Given the current Internet identity system, DNS, has been in use since the 1980’s, these focus areas are smart and offer considerable benefits for all users. For example Namecoin describes the modernizing role the blockchain could play, even accelerating performance as well as offering heightened levels of security.

BraveNewCoin writes about the ‘Blockchain Cloud‘, exploring further integration between the blockchain and the computing infrastructure of the Internet, such as how businesses might access and use Blockchain software. For example in this ZDNet article they describe how Microsoft is building out Blockchain services on Azure.

In their excellent laymans explanation A Framework for Identity, Dan Elitzer of the IDEO coLAB summarizes their recent work with Boston universities like MIT and Harvard, focused on exploring the key dynamics of the emergent blockchain, especially it’s generalized role as a new Identity infrastructure.

They cover how the blockchain can cater for aspects like personal data storage, and add value to the core Identity functions like authentication, programs and systems that are now well underway in lots of governments, so it wil be an easy overlay to also adopt blockchain methods and technologies, especially with this SaaS availability, such as the UK G-Cloud atracting its first supplier.

The fusion of the Blockchain and Digital Identity, will play a keystone role in enabling advanced Digital Government features like a unique Blockchain Identity, as is described in this video, where they propose they’re implementing the first Blockchain ID.

It’s further explored in this CCN article where they highlight its relationship to E-Estonia digital citizenship, describing it as a Blockchain passport function.

The potential for this technology is vast, entirely transforming how Government IT is implemented, eliminating $ trillions in unnecessary IT and process expense and bringing great benefit to citizens across the globe.

“the globe has roughly over 232 million undocumented migrants and continues to rise annually. Because many of these refugees have no identification, quite a lot of them are regularly victimized — especially women and children.”

A major development towards these goals has been the launch of the ID2020 initiative:

ID2020, which supports the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 16.9 to enable an officially recognized identity for all, is focused on an open, human-centric approach to identity, one that draws on recent advances in biometrics and innovative technologies.

Microsoft and Accenture have proposed a solution that will help key groups like refugees, where validating identity is a critical but very difficult process under the circumstances.

Microsoft’s main contribution to the project is supplying computing infrastructure through its Azure cloud service. The company also works closely with the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, an open-source software group that develops blockchain standards.

This Fortune article explains more and provides an interview with Blockchain gurus Don and Alex Tapscott.

]]>The GaaP model isn’t limited only to national ICT strategies, it can form the guiding strategy for cities and regions too.

In the Aspen report ‘City as a Platform‘ they provide a detailed introduction to the concept, headlined by the fact:

the challenge is finding new ways for city governments to navigate a transition to “platform governance”—network-based modes of interacting with citizens and co-producing services.

There are a number of exemplar case studies of cities pioneering these principles that offer leadership for others to follow.

Bristol CityOS – Open Programmable City

MIT offers this highly visual presentation of the core concept of ‘Senseable Cities‘, how the widescale deployment of IoT sensors can form the fundamental mesh of intelligent connectivity that enables the smart in Smart Cities.

Bristol in the UK interprets this vision through their idea of a ‘CityOS’, a city-wide operating system, explained through this presentation Bristol: Open Programmable City, where they describe how a massive amount of connectivity, a backbone of an Openflow-based software programmable network catering for 3G, 4G and 5G network access methods and a meshed network IoT ‘canopy of connectivity’.

This facilitates “a laboratory for urban change”, encouraging and enabling a portfolio of innovative programs that better connects citizens and visitors within the city, such as:

A Bristol ‘Citizens’ Sensor Box’ – A DIY Internet of Things toolkit for citizens to innovate and build their own home-based unit on the network to meet their own needs, as part of a broader ‘Citizen Sensing‘ momentum.

A Digital Data Dome– A powerful new way to visualize and interact with the amounts of data produced.

Milton Keynes – App Store Economic Innovation

Where Bristol is concentrated at the network layer Milton Keynes offers an ideal companion through their MK:Smart initiative, which builds their program around the key capability that enables the Platform business model, the city’s App Store.

A Cloud architecture core design – A configuration of IaaS / PaaS that enables ‘Tenant services’ (ie SaaS), that in an increasingly virtualized world will come to host network functions as VMs as well as application ones.

A Federated Identity framework for integrating digital services within a singular Identity system.

Orchestration and billing – All the core business functions for cataloging, provisioning and billing for services etc., with the modernization required to achieve Cloud Service Brokerage across multiple providers.

Apps Store Data Hub Architecture

The Apps Store element of the model can be further decomposed into a number of key Capabilities:

A SandBox Developers Environment

Onboarding workflows for new apps

Open Data Store

Big Data IoT Feeds

It also acts as an overall unifying architecture, an ‘information spine’ that aggregates all the sensor data to make it usable to the higher level apps.

Critically they also define how all of these technologies can be shaped by an overall strategic planning agenda, where the city’s leadership can play their key role.

For example this presentation to the Urban University Conference explores the overall initiative, and this presentation from MK’s Head of Policy focuses specifically on the IoT Sensor Network area.

Both cover the Strategic Planning aspects, the process MK went through to launch the initiative. A headline process of ‘vision setting’ begins with the fact the city will expand from 70,000 to 260,000+ and naturally this will present challenges. How can a Smart City help address them?

They then cascade down from the Strategic Planning phase through Programme Management to set the business context for the network, their Future City: Innovation Cluster, and how this will enable their MK:Smart initiative that applies apps & sensors to achieve Smart Lamp posts, garbage etc.

In other presentations they then dive even further, exploring specific Smart use cases, such as Parking and Field Gadgets, offering a compelling vision of an ‘Internet of Green Things‘.

Smart Grid – Agile Fractal Grid models

They focus around the headline idea of the city as a living organism, a way of capturing the “anatomy of a digital city” via an analogy of the city having a brain and nervous system, captured via the idea of an ‘fractalgrid‘.

Described is a system of 960 rural co-operatives, self-organizing a massive technology deployment through this highly dynamic organizational model, including a ‘Keiretsu‘ to act as an investor for the collective, as well as a shared services IT model that further enables a DevOps delivery capability.

It employs the same Infonova-based Digital Ecosystem platform that Milton Keynes utilizes, repeating that same framework for then enabling SME innovation within the marketplace, providing functionality like vendor on-boarding and cataloguing.

Digital City Accelerators

Michael Porters’ seminal principles of economic clusters have formed the backbone of many governments economic programs, and underpinned a plethora of industry and regional clusters.

Experts describe the essential formula of a ‘Triple Helix‘ design – One that synthesizes university research with local commercialization and government support, via one single framework.

Silicon Valley is the ultimate example of the economic wealth that can be generated when this achieves a ‘rinse and repeat’ level of maturity for producing, funding and commercializing high value university research.

What is especially noteworthy about attempts to replicate this effect is the synergy with Smart City initiatives, especially the keynote example of Milton Keynes and their ‘Smart:MK‘ digital city initiative. As described in this industry case study review, they have employed a Cloud-based platform for facilitating a ‘Digital Marketplace’ at the local city level.

This is why the Milton Keynes ‘Smart:MK’ smart city project is such a powerful case study example – They systematically enable this Triple Helix model through the implementation of a Platform.[/ms_alert]

As is described in detail in the case study in the ebook, Milton Keynes have deployed a ‘Developer Ecosystem’ platform, a community environment where local software entrepreneurs can make use of resources like sandboxes, hosting and API access to IoT networking. They can be empowered to rapidly iterate the Digital City applications of the future, and most notably this is within an overall program that links together the local Triple Helix combination.

Across all of these case studies is this consistent theme, a shift from linear, city-driven ICT procurement, where the traditional RFP process is followed sequentially in a waterfall like fashion, to buy and solely control equally traditional applications for city functions.

Instead cities shift to become facilitators, installing building block platforms that then enable a flourishing ecosystem populated by local SMEs, where through APIs and Open Data they dynamically build a catalogue of new apps via innovation-driven processes.

The Agile Fractal Grid describes their Ecosystem Enablement framework in this TMF presentation, and the MK:Smart highlights the over-arching most important point, how this approach acts as an accelerator for economic growth:

“Milton Keynes is incubating up to 90 new small and medium-sized businesses to deliver Internet of Things (IoT) applications as ecosystem partners and create hundreds of new jobs: the town’s council has already identified over £105 million ($159.5 million) cost savings and new revenues.”

This approach is now common across many cities, such as Tel Aviv, Pittsburgh, Dublin, Dholera and Shanghai, so if your city isn’t yet on board with this innovative approach, you’re already falling behind the new economy.

To turn these ideas into actionable implementations there are key reference materials such as a ‘Citizen Engagement Framework’ – A customer lifecycle model based on the Patient Engagement Framework, a healthcare-specific model, that can be generalized for any kind of citizen community interaction.

This can be addressed through a reference model that maximizes the benefits that this approach offers. In Putting the I in Healthcare, they talk about the Patient Engagement reference model, a best practice framework developed by the National eHealth Collaborative, for delivering high quality healthcare through utilizing these new information models.

This defines that patients should be supported through five major phases:

Empower Me ­- Enable the patient to conduct important transactions, through secure messaging.

Partner with Me -­ Let the patient begin to manage their own journey through the healthcare process.

Support My e­Community -­ Fully mesh all activities with all local service providers.

By simply exchanging ‘patient’ for ‘citizen’ any government agencies can adopt this same best practice, and use it to design their own citizen engagement model, one that exploits the powerful community aspects of the social web and transforms their linear transactional processes to become instead ‘Networks of Care’.

In conclusion we can define the value of this new transformative approach by refering back to the original pain point described:

In particular:”82% are unable to track citizen journeys from start to finish, making it difficult to recognise discontinuities across touchpoints and reduce abandonment.”

This Citizen Engagement Framework provides the required end-to-end interaction model, and within a context of a powerful way of achieving the interactions across the lifecycle through harnessing inherently social communities and virtual Networks of Care.

Cloud 2.0 – Enabling Networks of Care

‘Cloud 2.0’, blending Cloud computing technologies and Web 2.0 social communities, offer tremendously powerful mechanisms for greatly improving citizen social and health services, through enabling ‘Networks of Care’. In short a way of achieving ‘Buurtzorg‘.

The effect is described in more technical and operating detail through this white paper Accelerating a Network Model of Care. The paper describes how dedicated social network communities can be utilized as a vehicle for providing holistic healthcare to patients, where not only can their primary health specialist or doctor be a point of contact in the ongoing treatment but so can family and friends, as well as other supplementary caregivers.

When defining a Cloud computing strategy for Healthcare, Canada Health Infoway made this key observation:

5.2.4 Support for Social Networking and Consumer Enablement

“Cloud-based implementations provide a flexible and readily scalable method for supporting the integration of social networking into e-health service delivery patterns and enabling consumers of health services to become active participants in their care.

This could include participating in communities of people with the same condition, becoming part of their own virtual care team, or simply allowing people to participate in the scheduling of their own appointments or review of results.”

Traditional CRM is based on a one to many relationship, how the organization interacts with its many customers.

The Cloud 2.0 model is one of many to many, where the organization is still the central foundation but based upon this an essential part of the value for customers is their interaction with other customers/ citizens or healthcare patients.

Cloud 2.0 is about a shift to Crowdsourcing models, aka ‘Peer 2 Peer’ amongst others. In short it’s about the fact that one of the most useful relationships for a new cancer patient is not only a specialist doctor but also other patients.

Providing tools to enable these communities to form and function, like online social media, videoconferencing et al, is therefore the additional apps that flesh out the new Cloud 2.0 approach.

From Reaction to Prevention

The case study for Boulder County is a keen example of both of these principles. Their adoption of an integrated service delivery system has been guided by a simple but powerful objective at the heart of their transformation:

[su_note note_color=”#fcfcd6″]

focus on front-end and early intervention measures to prevent more costly services in the future.

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It sounds an obvious goal but the reality for most stretched case workers is they are always in a reactive mode, dealing with the consequences of social challenges. These consequences have multiple levels of cascading impacts and costs for government, and the use of data science yields insights which instead enables them to proactively tackle those issues before the impacts occur.

Crime is a key scenario for illustrating this effect. In Predictive Tools for Public Safety the author describes a number of case studies of the police using data analytics to proactively deter crime, rather than always be responding to crimes after they happen. This can eliminate multiple costs such as the damages caused, prison and court system expenses.

Santa Cruz turned to an applied mathematician to develop PredPol, for Predictive Policing, which analyzes previous property crimes to predict where future ones will occur, and plots these hot spots on maps, which are provided to officers at shift briefings for them to utilize for purposes of targeted patrol to prevent the crimes.

In 2006 violent re-offenders established Philadelphia as one of the murder capitals of the USA, and to tackle the issue they employed machine learning algorithms for probationer backgrounds to estimate the likelihood of violent re-offense, prioritizing resources accordingly to reduce the likelihood of future crimes.

Data-driven Strategies for Reducing Homelessness describes how New York City used analytics to proactively identify which families most likely to face homelessness, and intervene to prevent this occurring. HomeBase reduced the number of shelter applications by nearly 50% and reduced the number of days in shelter by 70%, resulting in $1.37 in savings for every dollar spent on the program.

Collaborative Case Management

The second transformative foundation is a Case Management system that enables multi-discipline team collaboration across many different agencies and organizations.

Government suffers from being severely ‘stovepiped’ – They are rigidly organized departmentally and citizens have to interact with each individually in isolation. Boulder County defined and addressed this:

In the past, these services were managed by multiple agencies. But in 2008 the County began a system-wide shift to co-create solutions for complex family and community challenges by fully integrating health, housing, and human services. The idea was to generate a more self-sufficient, sustainable, and resilient community by focusing on reducing the social determinants of poor health, removing barriers to services, and moving the system upstream towards an early intervention and prevention model.

Identifying the needs overlap across agencies, such as housing clients also being recipients of food assistance, they recognized that multiple departments where servicing the same core social challenge, and sought to better collaborate to maximize their collective impact, what they call “wrap around case management”.

Boulder County established an integrated case management (ICM) team and case management software that pulled data from across all the agencies so that they could work as a virtual team which enabled key process capabilities:

Track clients case histories across programs

Refer clients to additional program areas

Collaborate with other departments case workers

Assemble a portfolio of services

This improved the uptake of individual programs; for example using integrated case management has helped support Boulder County officials as they begin implementing the Affordable Care Act.

Analyzing information shared across the agency, staff are able to identify clients in one program area who may be eligible for subsidized insurance or Medicaid coverage, and can then send out notifications to encourage enrollment.

[su_note note_color=”#fcfcd6″]

Integrating Third Sector Services

A very important facet of this approach is the incorporation of the Third Sector organizations into the case management system. A multitude of social organizations such as homeless shelters play a part in the overall journey, and can be part of the client solution.

To further broaden the reach of the integrated case management system, county attorneys drafted memoranda of understanding to incorporate community partners such as nonprofits and community health centers.

[/su_note]

Maturity Model – Open Data for Social Impact

These new approaches highlight the key role that Open Data can play. For example MyLA311 describes how LA utilized Open Data publishing to tackle the issue of integrating data from multiple legacy systems, for purposes of auditing call centre performance dynamics.

These highlight the critical success factors for Open Data. In the Reuters white paper Does Open Data Need Journalism, they explore early Open Data projects and how many failed to deliver business or social value because they lacked a clear project objective and poor data quality methods. In short many were a result of governments simply seeking to ‘tick the Open Data box’ and defined success only as publishing the data, with no regard for its quality or its role in solving a particular need.

The field has now matured considerably and a number of best practice resources are available to better guide implementation strategies for Open Data.

The first foundation this establishes for transformation planning is that they define a continuum of technology maturity that integrates multiple other domains rather than treating it like yet another silo, such as Global Identifiers and APIs for example. This encourages and enables governments not to treat Open Data as a standalone project but as one component part of an overall enabling Open Platform Architecture in general.

Other resources offer guidance for how to link its use to meaningful social outcomes.

The Open Data Institute provides Assessment Tools for Open Data Initiatives, and the Sunlight Foundation published a four-step guide to help data professionals maximize the “social impact” and efficacy of those efforts. The 31-page document — called A Guide to Tactical Data Engagement — was written to help city leaders and residents collaborate on open data projects that improve government accountability and transparency, saying:

“Tactical Data Engagement is designed to help cities go beyond open data policy and even open data portals, to facilitate opportunities for the community use of open data to improve residents’ lives”.

Platformation of the Public Sector: Cloud Computing Tools at the Service of Social Change

In conclusion we can think of this overall trend as the ‘Platformation’ of the public sector. The integration of the Third Sector into government case management services is a key dynamic, and the potential for arming them with this mass scale of data-enabled insight is explored in this Canadian paper – Platformation – Cloud Computing Tools at the Service of Social Change.

Platformation prototypes new platforms for information sharing (platform + information = Platformation), which means it tests technological approaches that will enable nonprofits to operate like the open web.

They ask and imagine the huge potential for massive scale positive social transformation that would be made possible, simply through furnishing them with smarter data, and Open Data Science platforms will make this effect possible across government whole.

]]>http://digitalgovernment.io/open-data-science-high-performance-government-public-sector-platformation/feed/0Government as a Platform – Harnessing Collective Intelligencehttp://digitalgovernment.io/collective-intelligence/
http://digitalgovernment.io/collective-intelligence/#respondFri, 15 Dec 2017 10:32:22 +0000http://digitalgovernment.io/?p=11For government agencies seeking to understand and plan their Digital Government transformation journey, there are two main scopes of change to consider: Digital Service Enablement – Digitizing transactional workflows, moving them online but not changing how the process works. Collective Intelligence Transformation – Reinventing the process to a community operating model. Digital Service Enablement The […]

]]>For government agencies seeking to understand and plan their Digital Government transformation journey, there are two main scopes of change to consider:

Digital Service Enablement – Digitizing transactional workflows, moving them online but not changing how the process works.

Collective Intelligence Transformation – Reinventing the process to a community operating model.

Digital Service Enablement

The core building block is digitizing offline processes, moving paper-based forms workflow online so citizens can self-serve their own requirements.

This makes them more convenient for users and as insights from the SOCITM Better Connected report series described there are considerable cost efficiency improvements, highlighting a ‘Cost To Serve’ ratio that explains how much each different Citizen CRM channel costs:

Face to face : £7.40

Telephone: £2.90

Web: 32p

This is a hugely powerful win/win. Citizens can be spared the drudgery of visiting offices, repeatedly filling in paper-based forms, and government can be spared all the expense required to process them.

It’s not an insignificant task however. GovTech writes about how services have been moved online but still users still phone in their enquiries, and how they can’t easily determine what the reasons for this are including the usability of the service. This is a universal challenge, with fewer than half of newly designed UK council web sites passing a SOCITM usability test and in the USA Federal agencies accounted for five of the 10 worst customer service providers across 21 leading industries.

Collective Intelligence – Platform Business Models

While this digitization clearly delivers big benefits, it’s not truly transformational. The process is moved online but its operating model, who and how it is acted upon, stays the same. Alan Mather describes how the UK’s GDS lacks this broader perspective by focusing only on the digital service enablement.

Providing online access to government systems is of course the foundation component, but this only addresses the transactional aspects of government and fails to exploit the fundamental characteristic and benefit of today’s web technology: The ability to implement and build communities that harness the power of ‘Collective Intelligence‘.

The business community defines it as the ‘Platform Business Model’, exemplified through ventures like Uber Taxis and Aribnb, with the primary characteristic being the implementation of Digital Ecosystems, dynamic supplier communities meshed together through social and mobile applications.

A number of case studies illustrate this potential for public sector applications and the key transformation tools and techniques:

Social Media and Citizen Journalism

Harvard introduces the overall effect through defining Digital Government is the new social network, describing how pioneers like New York and Chicago are calling upon the tech sector to “help them build a platform more akin to Facebook than 311 as we know it.”

In an age of mass enablement of citizens through smart phones and social media and the vast data ecosystems they create via sites like Facebook, Twitter et al, there is near unlimited potential to harness them to publish communications, interact with citizens and also tap these massive pools of real-time information for new insights.

In Building the Social Town Hall, they chart an evolving maturity that advances from simple outbound announcements, through an interactive service interface to an ultimate conclusion of ‘Social Democracy’. In #CityHall on Social Media they expand on this critical point that social media is primarily about enabling two-way conversations.

Moreover the platform can be directed towards specific government needs, such as policing, through harnessing the public as an active resource. In Vancouver, following the riot by hockey fans thousands of civilian “journalists” submitted videos, photographs, and tips to the VPD over the next months, providing an unprecedented amount of evidence on the incident.

Social Mapping

Mapping is a powerful tool for engaging interactively with location-oriented data naturally, so especially relevant to cities and local authorities, and when combined with the community platform models, the key to unlocking truly transformational, citizen-driven digital government.

For example the HealthMap, developed by a team of researchers at Boston’s Children’s Hospital in 2006, brings together data from online news aggregators and social media platforms to produce real-time intelligence on the current global state of infectious diseases.

Civic Crowdfunding and Social Cities

Combining open data with citizen participation can unlock dynamic new models for transforming local communities, for example cataloging blighted properties could be further enhanced with crowdfunding projects to revitalize them for community needs, engendering both better civic engagement and also leveraging new financing models for cash strapped authorities.

San Francisco describes this as ‘Citizensourcing‘, a digital mix of hackathons, public engagement and a renewed focus on the city’s dynamic tech community. In Rotterdam citizens used a crowdfunding campaign to signal to government the need for a new footbridge to connect two parts of the city cut off by a busy road and railway line. The bridge project, called Luchtsingel, then attracted funding from the city government in order to complete it.

Next Bengaluru, an initiative by an NGO in Bangalore used online and offline methods to create a community vision for the redevelopment of one neighbourhood in the city. Between December 2014 and March 2015, 600 ideas were submitted by residents. A key outcome of the campaign was the identification of abandoned urban spaces as a major source of concern for residents as they are often used as places to dump rubbish. Residents were then asked to help create an online map of these spaces, to start a conversation with city officials about what could be done about them.

Digital Democracy

These scenarios demonstrate the first steps on a path towards wholesale reinvention of government, an entirely Digital Democracy. Citizens will play a much more direct role in the decision making and implementation of public services.

Potent use cases include participative budgeting. In 2014, the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo launched Madame Mayor, I have an idea, a participatory budgeting exercise which will allocate €500 million to projects proposed by citizens between 2014 and 2020, and claims to be the largest exercise of its kind in the world.

New tools have emerged to enable this collective government, in particular open source software such as Loomio, used by the FairShares Association, a grouping of social enterprises, to propose, debate and make decisions about a range of issues, and the the German Pirate Party uses LiquidFeedback for internal party decisions and elections.

Process Transformation

In conclusion governments don’t need to reinvent democracy today to harness these powerful dynamics for their more immediate needs, they can be applied for very practical benefit to their core business process needs, especially for complex, high volume scenarios that require expertise not easily available in government.

An insightful example is the Peer to Patent portal, which applies the effect to the USPTO’s patent application process, a workflow that requires important decisions on a huge variety of scientific and technical topics, that must reference a history of equally academic prior decisions. It illustrates how Open Government is not just about more open reporting for people to passively look at, it’s actually about re-engineering the process itself, to deliver considerable efficiency improvements and critically, enable more open public participation.

Pioneered by Open Government leader Beth Noveck, the project is documented via a detailed case study in this 40 page Harvard white paper. Beth describes how the agency was building up a huge backlog of patent applications due to a ‘closed’ approach where only staff from the USPTO could review, contribute and decide upon applications.

Not only did this cause a bottleneck due to the number of resources being utilised but also in terms of the volume and quality of subject matter expertise being applied. With no involvement from outside contributors, such as experts from the scientific community, then awards were being granted for applications based on very limited and often inaccurate knowledge.

Peer to Patent transformed this to a ‘crowd’ model, opening up the workflow to a distributed community of experts from across many different organisations, and apply collective efforts to greatly increase both quality and speed. IBM provides a detailed overview in this video, and this intro from Audiopedia provides a laymans guide.

Open sourcing best practices

The hyper accelerating dimension is the use of open source software, itself a product of collective intelligence, to distribute these capabilities as reusable best practices. Inventive new ways to tackle a particular social problem can be developed in the USA where considerable funding and skills are available to do so, and then reused across the world where they have the same issues but not those same resources.

Fundamentally these improvements translate into more social impact and value for money, through more efficient sharing of best practices. As Beth describes:

“In practice, this means that if a community college wins a grant to create a videogame to teach how to install solar panels, everyone will have the benefit of that knowledge. They will be able to play the game for free. In addition, anyone can translate it into Spanish or Russian or use it as the basis to create a new game to teach how to do a home energy retrofit.”